Europe’s population is projected to contract by 8.3% by 2050, from around 591 million today to 542 million, according to the Berlin Institute for Population and Development (BIPD).

By contrast, in all other areas of the world – with the exception of Russia – the population is expected to expand, with the highest rates in Africa (105%) and the US and Canada (30.7%).

Russia’s population is expected to shrink by 21.1%, from 142 million today to 112 million.

The BIPD study, published on 24 November, also rates the long-term sustainability of populations in 285 different regions in Europe, based on indicators such as economic performance, age structure, employment levels, and investment in research and development.

Within Europe, the most sustainable region was identified as an oval area stretching from Stockholm and Oslo down to London, Paris, and Germany, the Benelux countries and through to Switzerland and western Austria.

The least sustainable areas are remote rural regions in southern Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland. These areas suffer from low fertility rates, massive outward migration and the marked ageing of the population, the survey shows.

Within the newer member states, which in general fare worse than older member states, the survey notes a clear divide between countries that made a relatively quick transition from a planned economy to a market economy – such as the Baltic states, the Czech Republic and Slovenia – and those (including Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia) that were plunged into a decade of political and economic crisis when the Iron Curtain was lifted.

Fertility and migration rates

The study finds that in every country in the EU, women have fewer than 2.1 children, the level needed to keep populations stable in the long run. However, there are wide differences across the member states. Polish women have an average of 1.3 children, while the figure for Ireland, France, Norway and Sweden is around 2, the BIPD says.

The BIPD attributes this difference to the development of state social policies. “Countries with high fertility rates invest substantial sums in the family-friendly infrastructure needed to enable both partners to work,” the BIPD said.

According to the study, peripheral and rural areas of Europe – areas where large families were once common – are at the highest risk of population decline. In regions of northern Spain, southern Italy, eastern Germany, and large parts of Romania and Bulgaria, fertility rates have fallen well below 2.1.

“Remote areas no longer have any means to stem outward migration – they are simply drained empty”, the survey says.

France, the UK, Belgium, Ireland the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries have a fertility rate less than 2.1 (in their cases, 1.7 or more), but they have managed to keep their population levels stable through migration.

In 2006 alone, labour markets in Ireland and the UK were replenished with 48,038 workers from Poland and 1,695 from Latvia, the survey notes. Meanwhile, 108, 548 job seekers from Romanian and 16,866 from Bulgaria migrated to Spain.

A substantial number of Britons also migrated to Spain – 38,367, while 11,869 Germans went to Switzerland in 2006 – but those figures can be largely attributed to people opting to spend their retirement in these countries.

“Europe’s borders are largely open, and cheap flights have made for a mobility hitherto unknown in Europe,” the BIPD notes.

Labour markets in the newer member states, are increasingly being replenished with workers from Ukraine and Moldova. “In the future, more and more migrants will have to come from non-European countries”, BIPD said.

Barry Davies

It’s hardly surprising, the idiocy of schengen is causing the drain from the east to the west, and people from the west are leaving the eu area completely to find work as there are not enough jobs for everyone in the west. Additionally the fiscal waste endemic with the eu means that people can’t afford children anymore, they have become a luxury item. Cutting the population however is a good thing, not a bad one because there are limits on sustainability throughout the world.

Needless to say that this review is politically correct and so ignoring the adverse consequences of qualitative migratory developments; the Netherlands and Belgium are thus admired for having compensated the dearth of births of their own people by immigration. But as a 60-years old habitant of cities like The Hague, Amsterdam, Antwerpen, Brussels I count my days of the still 5 years to go, before I can leave these islamized cridles of civil wars to take refuge in some remote under-populated areas of Europe. Sustainebility is certainly not just an econimical notion, a man needs to breath culturally as well, far from multiculti doxtrinal repression.

Posted on 11/26/08 | 2:48 PM CET

Paul Ator

Demographic considerations are at the core and very center of longterm resource management and ecological sustainability at every level.